Oh well at least we're not chasing paperwork today but....

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So like I mentioned yesterday, Friday is one of the few free days we have to explore and be tourist. The girls actually slept until 7:30 this morning, which seems to be late for them. We took our time down at the breakfast buffet since we were planning to go across the street to the park about 10 or so.

We figured out how to navigate the underground tunnel thing, pretty neat to be able to get across the street without worrying about getting run over.

It was a bit muggy when we first went out but figured it wouldn't be that bad, well that was before we started climbing the first hill. It didn't take long for the humidity and heat to make us change our minds. Man it was stuffy! We didn't get very far before we started attracting the curious locals. They picked up on Rose being able to speak Mandarin and wouldn't leave the poor girl alone. This one woman walked with us for the longest time, every once in a while she would look over at us, smile and give us the thumbs up, but I think Rose was getting tried of her hanging on her. We faked needing to stop by the bathroom just to get away from her only to run into another person that just had to find out about these crazy westerners walking around with not just 1 girl but 3 of them. I can't imagine what they think about us since most people only have 1 child and they want a son, not 3 daughters.

After we finally got away from that fellow we decided to rethink our trip to the park. It's supposed to be a bit cooler tomorrow and less chance of rain so maybe we'll try again then. Hate not to see the place, it was like walking into a jungle with all the palm trees, bamboo, ferns and such. There were all kinds of things going on. There was a group of seniors playing traditional Chinese instruments and a woman singing, pretty cool to listen to. There were people up in the woods above the path we were on that were doing some kind of dance and singing, well more of a chant then anything.

The park is quite large, it's called Yuexiu Park if you want to check it out on the web. The Guangdong TV tower I mentioned in one of the early blogs is located in this park. They have a cultural amusement center there and there's a radio mansion in the park. I'm not sure what either one of those are but if it has anything to do with radios or electronics I'll all there!

The other thing that caused us to cut our park trip short, it started to rain pretty good, as if we weren't already wet from the heat.

Interesting thing about the street outside the hotel, as is common I guess in most big cities there's always people walking about trying to sell you stuff. There's a couple people out here trying to sell you a iPhone, or at least it looks like a iPhone but they show it to you kind of like the fellow you see in the movies that pulls his sleeve up and says “hey buddy, wanna buy a watch?” The interesting thing I've noticed every time one of them has tried to sell me the phone it always has 10:04 on the display no matter what time of day it is. Guess they figure no one is going to notice, no one except a geek like me. I wonder if the thing even works at all.

For those of you that enjoy a shot of vodka, the 7-11 next door has a bottle of Smirnoff, 1 liter bottle for only 1200 RMB. That's about $200 US, think I'll stick with Coke Zero, it's only 3.5 RMB. I ran down there to get the girls some snacks and us something other then room temperature bottled water to drink. Jenny was really happy when I found they had Mt Dew. It's a really cool looking bottle, I'd love to take some home to Troy as much as he loves the stuff. Not that it taste any different it's just a cool looking bottle.

So here we are stuck in our room, watching it rain and wishing there was something we could do to keep everyone entertained. Hopefully the rain will slack off later and we can go down to the playground. We did run over to McDonalds and get the girls a ice cream cone. That went over pretty good.

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